The Lair

When it started out, Wikipedia was a poster child for everything that mainstream media outlets wasn’t – decentralized control and editing abilities (“anyone can edit anything!”) and filled with obscure yet fascinating pieces of information. Is it the same today? Yes, yes it is but the limits under which Wikipedia (like most other organizations) must operate have become clearer. Because yes, there are limits. A free-for-all editing structure requires more rules, not fewer.

The first signs: banning Church of Scientology IP addresses from editing Wikipedia. So, not such a big deal after all – Wikipedia routinely bars most open proxy IPs from editing pages, after repeated and sustained editing abuse. This is all part and parcel of Wikipedia practice, made necessary because of the anonymous internet. Perhaps it was the first time that Wikipedia had performed an organizational IP block, though (although I doubt it).

But this most recent case? Much worse, depending on your perspective. The New York Times is reporting that Wikipedia voluntarily suppressed news about a kidnapping in order to prevent the ransom value from going up.

Times executives believed that publicity would raise Mr. Rohde’s value to his captors as a bargaining chip and reduce his chance of survival. Persuading another publication or a broadcaster not to report the kidnapping usually meant just a phone call from one editor to another, said Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times

Mmmm. Collusion to prevent the publication of items with legitimate news interest to the public? check. Self censorship? check.

And then it gets better.

The Wikipedia page history shows that the next day, Nov. 13, someone without a user name edited the entry on Mr. Rohde for the first time to include the kidnapping. Mr. Moss deleted the addition, and the same unidentified user promptly restored it, adding a note protesting the removal
…
Around that time, Catherine J. Mathis, the chief spokeswoman for the New York Times Company, called Mr. Wales and asked for his help.

And then there is a (not very) interesting story of cat-and-mouse, of editorial freezings of pages and so on.

What does this all mean? The person asked by the article author seems to think that –

[Wikipedia] role in suppressing news about Mr. Rohde would [probably not] prompt an outcry among longtime editors, because in the Rohde case, lives were at stake

That’s probably true. I don’t think there was any other choice for Jimmy Wales and his administrators, even if they had contemplated alternatives. But on the other hand, the media is responsible for the destruction of lives too. What made the life of a random reporter (who must have known about the risks going in) more important than media witch hunts which bring down so many?

Part of the appeal of a true crowd sourcing was that interests were diluted. No single person is accountable, no single point of view pushed (but then again, we all know that with Wikipedia editorial politics, that was never true at any point anyway). What if the next people who’s lives are at stake don’t have Jimmy Wales on their rolodeck to call and ask for a special favour? Democracy didn’t die with the publication of this story. The illusion that any crowd sourced site is more powerful than the administrative cabal probably did though. And not a moment too soon.

It seems like a made-for-a-VC-presentation fairytale – an oppressed people rise up, converge online and overthrow the comedic villain that everyone loves to hate. It could even be the next “You Got Mail” (You Can Haz Tweets?). On the face of it, I should be all over this – power to the people, information should be free, and hey, it’s Iran. My (completely irrelevant and probably unedified) view from several thousand miles away is that there could be worse things that a change of regime. And that this view is probably diametrically opposed to my country’s foreign policy causes me much amusement.

But somewhere, Iran’s Twitter Revolution went a little bit awry.

By no means the first, but (as usual) one of the most succinct descriptions came from the Economist.

Meanwhile the much-ballyhooed Twitter swiftly degraded into pointlessness. By deluging threads like Iranelection with cries of support for the protesters, Americans and Britons rendered the site almost useless as a source of information—something that Iran’s government had tried and failed to do

A quick anecdote – count the number of Iranians on the #iranelection hashtag page. Come back when you reach 10. Take provisions, you may be gone a while.

But there was more to come. The next big thing was the Sea of Green where everyone was supposed to give their Twitter avatar a sickly (or hulk-like) cast of green. And here, Twitter to the rescue.

Slowly buy (sic) surely, green-shaded Twitter icons of bored American housewives will destroy the grand ayatollah’s will to go on

And there is even an unsurprising followup.

My little tweet about how sad it is that in 2009, activism = turning your Twitter icon green, got me in a little bit of hot water last night

Because I know exactly how many things have been solved by hand wringing, blog posts ad nauseum, tweets and even candlelight vigils and demonstrations at busy roundabouts. Answer: a bit less than the people doing them might think.

ETA: Saw this post a couple of days ago. I love the picture of the failwhale.
ETA-2: The latest thing appears to be changing the timezone/location of your Twitter profile to match Tehran. Because allegedly, security forces are using these pieces of information to crack down on Iranian sources. Clearly, this is far easier than Iranians (who may genuinely be at risk) changing their information to something like GMT/London in order to blend in. Anyway, I would be shocked if Twitter and Facebook were still accessible via normal means from within Iran.

Remember that whole fuss about public key cryptography? The premise is really simple. What it means for most of us is – never type in an ssh password again, your public/private keys should seamlessly handle all the nasty security bits. So, today – I found myself wanting to do something like that described here.

Simple right? I had a private key generated which I used for code I write in my spare time. Now I needed another private key. Yes, another one – because a few people reading commit logs at a very serious bzns organization might wonder who the hell drac is – and why his commits are appearing in their top-secret git repository.

Generate another private key. Simple.

ssh-keygen -t rsa


Mail the just-generated public key off to the guy setting up the repository and all is well. Except it wasn’t. Because I find that multiple invocations of ssh-keygen generate the same public/private keypair. Yup, generate a keypair for drac AT this domain. Invoke ssh-keygen again, fully expecting a different pair of keys to be created for [real name]. Umm. No. Same key.

I don’t know yet if this is a bug, or expected behaviour for ssh-keygen. Or if it is merely a quirk/bug of the ssh-keygen bundled with msysgit. In any case, I was surprised.

And if none of that made any sense to you folks, never mind. Tomorrow, I’ll tell you how I did some git ninja work. Do turn up, won’t you?

yes, wonkey = one key. I’m feeling particularly creative today

The coffin corner is one of those concepts that I remember reading ages ago but forgot until a recent memory joggle. In this case, the jab to the memory came from a slightly sensationalist analysis of how Air France flight 447 may have been downed.

So while you are napping, eating or watching a movie on that flight to LAX, you should know the plane you are flying is cruising along at the ratty edge of its capabilities. Why? Money. The higher an airliner flies, the better gas mileage it gets.

With the slight caveat that going a bit too high can cause the airplane to do all sorts of things it shouldn’t be doing – like stalling. Actually, that is sage advice for pretty much anyone, including that dude called Icarus. But I digress. The point is, those kinds of tradeoffs are everywhere.

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